Novelist William Gibson once wrote that Japanese youth shopping chain PARCO made “Fred Segal on Melrose look like an outlet store in Montana.”

After the occupation of Japan ended, very few youth ever encountered actual Americans, and Japanese television, magazines, and retailers crafted idealized versions of American life purely for marketing purposes. For the most part, Japanese youth adopted American fashion in imitation of other Japanese. 

Pan Pan Girls wore brightly colored American dresses and platform heels, with a signature kerchief tied around their necks. They permed their hair, caked on heavy makeup, and wore red lipstick and red nail polish. Pan Pan Girls’ jackets had enormous shoulder pads in imitation of officers’ wives. Prewar, Western fashion and customs had entered society through the male elite and trickled down. In a topsy-turvy social reversal, the first to wear American-style clothing in postwar Japan were women

films mostly influenced womenswear, because Japanese society already accepted that women should follow global trends. Cinema did little to convince older men to dress up.

In the ensuing moral panic about the apure, parents monitored clothing as an early warning sign for disobedient tendencies. The black gakuran symbolized adherence to traditional Japanese values; American clothing like Hawaiian shirts or MacArthur-style aviator sunglasses implied contempt for societal norms. Adults believed that fashionable clothing foretold not just unfilial behavior, but potentially criminal minds.

The sensation “Oh, Mistake Incident” of 1950 solidified these mental associations between youth fashion and moral decay. Hiroyuki Yamagiwa, a nineteen-year-old chauffeur at Nihon University, broke into a coworker’s car at knifepoint, slashed the driver, and drove off with ¥1.9 million of cash stuffed in salary envelopes. Yamagiwa then took his girlfriend on a three-day joyride. The police easily apprehended the young lovers, but the minor crime made headlines after Yamagiwa screamed out in pidgin English “Oh, mistake!” upon arrest. During police interrogation, Yamagiwa continued to drop random English words into his Japanese and also revealed a tattoo that puzzlingly said “George.”

Button-down shirts, which signified old money in the U.S., became linked with criminal behavior in Japan.

This time the publisher wanted a mook (“magazine-book”)

The down vest was previously completely unknown in Japan. When the Heibon Planning Center editors returned from Alaska in 1974 wearing them, passersby asked them if they had forgotten to take off their life jackets after yachting. By the Heavy Duty boom, Ginza looked like a weekly convention of rescue-and-recovery workers.

Crisp dress shirts in Japan are still called wai-shirts (or “Y-shirts”), derived from the fact that they were only permissible in white (waito).

American Air Force pilots surely wore jackets just like these in 1945 when they bombed every single centimeter of urban Japan. Was this interest in U.S. military gear Stockholm Syndrome on a national scale? A sales clerk at Voice Harajuku once said of the used clothing boom, “This is all because Japan lost the war. If Japan had won, Americans right now would probably be competing to wear kimonos.” But these jackets were not necessarily a knee-jerk embrace of American cool. For a certain set of middle-aged Japanese men, American military gear invoked both a universal machismo as well as nostalgia for the Occupation—an iconic period of Japanese history in which Americans just happened to appear. Faux flight jackets also allowed middle-aged men to take a “healthy” interest in military affairs without breaching the taboos of Japanese wartime memorabilia.

“Ivy is a lot like tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet). It was originally German but now it’s just a part of Japanese cuisine. You serve it with rice and miso soup and eat it with chopsticks.

“When it’s your own culture, you tend to stop learning mid-way through. But we kept studying until we got to the very edge of knowledge.” As Kurino explains, an American looked at a button-down collar and thought, “I have to attach these buttons, “but the Japanese in the 1960s thought instead, “Why does this collar have buttons?” One question led to another for over fifty years, resulting in a nation with an unprecedented collective understanding of American fashion.